Convexity & Tail Engineering: Designing Portfolios for Stress, Gamma, and Nonlinear Payoffs: A Comprehensive Options Guide
Markets don't reward linear thinkers. True risk lives in the tails, where liquidity collapses, correlations break, and convexity becomes destiny.
Convexity & Tail Engineering is a modern handbook for building portfolios that survive and compound across stress regimes, dislocations, and volatility cycles. Blending quantitative theory with institutional practice, Sterling Whitmore provides a pragmatic framework for harnessing gamma, skew, and nonlinear exposures to enhance robustness, create convex return distributions, and monetize volatility dynamics across market states.
Inside, readers learn how to:
- Measure convexity, skew, and kurtosis in tradable terms
- Construct portfolios that profit from disorder, not just stability
- Use options, vol products, and structured exposures to engineer payoff geometry
- Employ scenario stress testing, rebalancing rules, and distribution-aware risk controls
- Contrast linear beta portfolios with nonlinear convex portfolios
- Bridge the gap between crisis alpha, vol harvesting, and regime-switching strategies
- Navigate the limitations of VaR, expected shortfall, and traditional mean-variance analytics
- Design gamma-sensitive overlays and tail-positive hedges
- Map payoff surfaces to volatility surfaces
- Integrate convex compounding into long-horizon wealth models
Rather than offering theoretical curiosities, the book delivers an applied blueprint for risk managers, quants, allocators, and traders who need to build resilient systems that compound through chaos, not in spite of it. The result is a toolkit for a new era of portfolio engineering: nonlinear, adaptive, and structurally convex.
Customer Reviews
ThriftBooks® and the ThriftBooks® logo are registered trademarks of Thrift Books Global, LLC
